And larger print.

One thing that I have found with my senior father, is that he loves being able to increase the print size to be able to read.  Prior to getting an e-reader a few years back he could only read large print editions.  Which in print magazines are quite rare....

Might also be a contributing factor to seniors quick adaption to tablets.

Tim

Joe I'd say

your projection for 'within 5 years' is probably right.  This does have ups and downs, of course.  I don't have a tablet, or even a smart phone yet, but do use the computer and tv for my news, and RR stuff.  Only reason I have a local newspaper subscription is for my wife to do the crosswords, and it's easier to find local news/sports that way. 

The flip side is it saves TONS literally on materials to print and also for landfills/recycling, and tons in terms of dollars.  Hurts the Postal Service business too unfortunately.  Also, MRH by being all-digital/internet, there is a forum with instant feedback and comments and updates, and you can really interact with the writers.  And you can take it with you on your smart or tablet, without taking up room in your car, briefcase, whatever.  You won't have boxes of old mags that hopefully never get wet, chewed on by mice or bugs, etc.

print

I just dont know. For how to's I prefer print (ink and paper). I can not imagine reading a novel on a tablet or E reader. There are just something's that present themselves better in print. For me the only MRR mag that I have in my house at this time is Nov. 2011 issue with Lance  mindheim's scratch build N. scale turnout piece. I also have 30 or so NG&SLG and maybe 20 specialty mags. At one time I must have had  hundreds of back issues of all kinds.My computer has allowed me to get rid of those,but why keep the one I do? I guess I find them special,unique,valuable, useful and accessible. I dont think the print industry is going away. It is going to shrink and change. The real battle will be who will deliver the material? Amazon or the brick and mortar store.

Although I wont put any money on it, I will put my heart behind the B+M stores for hobby and print. And besides I got cheese ( I think its cheese ) older than the internet in my icebox.

john

Novels and ebooks

John:

Once you've travelled and had a couple dozen novels/ebooks in your iPad, you can't imagine going anywhere without it. It's amazing to be on a long flight and to be able to flip between reading different novels/ebooks in a moment.

With Kindle books or iBooks, you can make the font larger or smaller as needed, and you can pinch out zoom in on photos and diagrams to study them up close. You can highlight and bookmark text as often as you like, then jump to it with the flick of a finger. You can tap the table-of-contents icon and bam, you're in the TOC. If something grabs your eye, you can tap the TOC entry and boom, you're there.

Paper seems so inconvenient compared to something like the iPad.

...

If the Model railroading avenues kick and drag, you have to remember they are businesses first and in light of increasing costs to print and stagnant or declining subscription numbers, they will be seeing their revenues turn red and in short notice.

Once those revenues go red, it's over Very Quickly...
 

novels and e-books

Some years ago I took the Zephyr from Denver to Seattle. I have flown from Denver to Italy. I have spent a night in a nuclear submarine. I have made all the roadtrips,fishing, camping, hunting trips where I have had to just hunker down and wait out the rain/snow. The one constant thing I had to have was a book or two.

You keep your ipad for as long as its relevant and then throw it out when the next best thing comes along. When the batteries run out or the power fails or,god forbid you find yourself in a place where there is no wifi and you just have to know what happens to Robert Jordan at the end. Let me know and Ill send you a print copy of  'for whom the bell tolls'

Excuse me if I sound a little rude,I dont mean to be. I also dont want to sound like a Luddite. I use the digital platforms in many ways. (my trains,my camera,my computer and tv) and I like it. I just think that it is not the be all,end all of future uses and products.

When I go to my just reward you will be able to read my obit in the newspaper,just like my dads was and I daresay just like my son and grandchildren will be.

enough

john

"And besides I got cheese ( I

"And besides I got cheese ( I think its cheese ) older than the internet in my icebox."

I hope not John.

When I was at University of Toronto way back in 1972, we were on USENET and that had been around since just after World War Two. In the early '80s it was renamed and grew from there.

I agree Joe and for those of us not rich enough to afford an iPad, Both Samsung and ASUS have tablets with the same functionality at half the price.  

There was a discussion on the History Channel...

about how today we learn about ancient civilizations going back 10,000 years B.C.  The records are carved in stone. The stone tablets have lasted these thousands of years!  I'm  not saying we go back to stone.

The discussion got into what we as today's civilization are doing for record keeping. Many of today's paper publications are printed on a paper that is produced with acid content.  Those publications will not survive, but will crumble away over several hundreds of years.

So just for discussion. With everything being stored on computers what would survive during a global EOL event? What about 10,000 years after the EOL event?  What record of our civilization would remain?

Changes come regardless.

Den

...

Global EOL event, humanity gets "reset."  Simple as that.

A major corona mass ejection

could possibly seriously affect magnetically stored data, without having harmful biological effects.

Print advertising revenue is way down

Part of the problem also for print magazines and especially for newspapers is that advertising revenue (what they survive on, not subscriptions) is way down overall. There is an article about it at AEI Ideas with a good graphic. 

Note that online revenue is down also. I think this is going to be a problem for the industry as a whole very soon. However,  I also believe that specialty magazines related to specific hobbies or interests have less of a problem than general ones. Online resources, such as MRH, will hopefully be less affected than print magazines. 

I do have a Kindle but use it rarely. Not because I don't like it but because I'm used to print and still prefer things that way. If I traveled more, I would probably use it more.  Also, the cost of print subscriptions keeps going up. That will certainly lead to a cancellation at some point.

Heres my take

The railroad hobby magazine business has always had 2 main players, with your smaller, less established publications popping up here and there, but MR and RMC are the 2 long standing prints that come to mind, with MR being the leader. MR seems to just now be jumping on with digital media, years after MRH came on the playing field. Does RMC even do any kind of digital publishing? 

So with print on the decline, and MR being a little late on the game with digital, its going to be hard for them, or any other traditional printing magazine to swing their momentum the other way to gain a solid foothold in the new marketplace.

Digital will last for a long time, short of any kind of EMP, and print will last until your next house fire. As for what humans 10,000 years in the future will think of our civilization, Im sure they will have a good idea seeing all our destroyed building from nuclear bombs. Knowing what new layout design from David Barrow or the latest engines from Athearn wont be high on their list

Steven

Sad but true

Sad but true. I like paper. Fits in the stand beside the ceramic throne much better than a device.

The demise of major print publications may not be so much a question of paper vs electrons. It may be more about availability. The Internet opened up flood gates of free, timely, searchable information. It changed the game by cutting delivery time to zero. Paper publishing can never compete against instantaneous delivery. So, it is my belief it is more about consumption expectations than it is about the medium. If I could have same day delivery of free MRH in paper form would I prefer it over the computer version? Dog gone tootin' I would.

One unintended consequence of this change are the mounds of garbage on the Internet. Since the Internet has such a low cost of publication there is little thought given to whether or not material is worth publishing. In the print world there is a substantial cost to delivery of content. This cost effectively acted like a garbage filter. The filter is gone now. Welcome to an information world full of litter. This post reply and my LK&O blog are proof enough 

Alan, it's been true all along

Alan, the information glut on the internet is just the latest in the long stretch of information delivery advances mankind has seen through the ages.

Back in the day when stone tablets were the thing, building and delivering content was tedious and it was bulky. Then we got to papyrus and the content became a lot less bulky, but still very manual - but it was a lot less durable. At first scrolls were useful for making long documents, but the access was very serial and not real convenient.

Then books came along, making random access a lot easier, but it was still a very manual process to create a book, so the public generally didn't have access to all this information - only the privileged scholars.

The printing press changed all that. Now, making copies of content was a lot easier for the general public and we came out of the dark ages because information was now more freely available to the masses.

Still, paper was fragile (subject to insects, moisture, fire) and could be bulky to ship around, so libraries came into vogue where you could go and peruse hundreds of books on many topics.

With the advent of the internet, we now have near instant access to a library of information that would take many cities to contain if it were all in physical form - and accessing this content conveniently would be nearly impossible. The internet has made it possible to actually turn all this information into something you can easily filter and access.

But in every age, the content delivery mechanism is not perfect - they each have their weaknesses and ways they can be easily destroyed. With each development has come the way to access this content without getting completely buried. Only with the internet and electronic devices can the current glut of information even be accessed conveniently. The knowledge potential for mankind positions us for massive new levels of breakthrough in all areas thanks to the fact we can realistically access all this information.

Odd but!

Odd! I'm happy to read MRH on a computer but I still have paper subscriptions to MR, RMC and several other non-US magazines. At present it is because I do not have anything smaller than a PC, but the wife has a Kindle. I looked at getting a Kindle HD Fire until I saw that I couldn't download MR, via Amazon, because I live outside the US (unless I've not fully understood something!).

However, I keep looking at the IPad (and the mini version), and finding it harder to resist! I like to curl up on the sofa, with music in the background, and read the paper versions, but after 'borrowing' the wife's Kindle, I can see the day getting very close when I will change (well, I did hint at a birthday present!). With RMC coming up for renewal shortly, and having downloaded a trial edition, I'm satisfied with the result.

As regards information overload on the Internet compared to the printed version, I have published photographs that I took of trains back in the 1970's / 1980's that someone may be wanting, for their modeling. I know I do the same, it's just filtering out the 'litter'.

Brian 

...

THANK GOD!

I for one am extremely happy "everybody" finally has a roughly equal opportunity to get what they personally do or say published.  Yes, this has decimated those steady stable careers in writing, but now anybody can gain a following and without the arbitration of a group of people trying to fit a bill to their beak.

And the world of paper has been full of litter for as long as paper has been around.  I toss most of my mail right into the trash, so much litter comes to me in that form!!

I've been purchasing the

I've been purchasing the Digital version of RMC and a few Guitar magazines for awhile now.  I actually prefer the digital versions now.  No more wife complaining about magazines all over the house, no more storage issues and if I want a paper copy of a good article I just print it. 

One more thing..........

If you go to RMC's website you can download a free issue and get a taste for it. 

Electronic Magazines

There are things electronic media doesn't do as well as paper.  Plans for example.  Using a scale plan on a smart phone is pretty much impossible.  You might be able to print out a copy of the plan (but then that's paper isn't it?) however it only works if the copy and the printer retain the scale and proportions of the drawing.  If either are off the plan could be off and will make the use of it very difficult.

The other thing is how to pay for it.  People are used to having free access to stuff on the internet.  Making money off free stuff is tough.  Witness all the dot com failures.  I only pay for subscriptions to publications who have content I can use.  I used to subscribe to MR, I found I only used a few articles a year.   I don't subscribe anymore. The other risk of publishing on the internet paid by advertising is that you are advertising something right next door.  I do a lot of shopping on the internet.  If MRH charged for an issue, would I pay for it to access advertisers or would I just go to them directly?  Most vendors can send you newsletters announcing new products.  I get e-mails from Tichy, Westerfield and several others.  MRH seems to have found a formula.  The question is will there be others to compete or is the real issue the number of magazines required?

As the internet becomes saturated . .

. . . with every possible "how to" answer, just a search click away, what happens to the monthly "how to" magazine concept? Does it then become just a "new news" news feed?

Dunno what happens in 30 years ...

... but there are a ton of folks (vendors included) out there that simply don't "get" the internet.  My favorite hobby shop is one example.  Sure they have a web page, but not an online order desk - call or email only.  And I'm pretty sure that there are a ton of guys making stuff in their garages that don't offer it for sale on the web.

  MRH has a chance to change all that, by searching out, getting ads and exposing vendors to the audience they are missing - sort of the model railroading "google" engine.  Sure you can find them on your own - maybe, but it sure is more convenient to be able to find them in one place, possibly read a review or two about some of the things that other modelers have found useful (or deficient).

  My cousin gave me a stack of her husband's unopened "N-Scale" magazines form 1996 (!)  They were fun to look through.  Lots of Rapido couplers on stuff - and not a single "www" in any of the ads.  I went through a couple and tried to google some of the suppliers and add them to my growing list of links.  Some are still around, others have disappeared.  So, other than an interesting look back, I'm not sure that much of the information in those old stacks are useful, at least for the amount of space they take up.

  I really want to order the Model Railroader DVD archive - mostly for the ability to look up that article that I can't quite remember all the details of that I know I saw "way back when".  I just have a hard time justifying spending $200 on it when I know how much flex track or code 55 rail that can buy!

Toni

RMC

Steven, I just checked and yes, RMC offers digital editions, but it looks like they are browser based. Not PDF or EPUB format.

Downside

All those models featuring paper mills and publishers take on a new look - not so many rail cars picking up rolls of newsprint paper, parking lots not so full, pulp processing from wood chips declining. News stands getting dusty - not so many bills posted on the buildings and fences. Era concerns - was that publisher still operating in 2013?

End of Pring

Jim and Joe.

I saw both the articles you referenced a day or so ago. What we are witnessing is the creative destruction of the print industry. It is a natural part of the evolution of progress.

A good example is fuel injection used in todays automobiles, It led to the death of the carburetor.  I assume you can still purchase carburetors, but they are a specialty item.  Companies that couldn't or wouldn't make the necessary changes in their products are no longer in business.

The same will be true for print. There may be a few specialty publications that remain, but by and far most will go out of business. MRH is on the "bleeding edge" of this new way of providing information. There is still a steep learning curve to be conquered with new technology and marketing methods being developed.

So what will the MRH publication look like in five or ten years? Who knows? But I suspect that we will look back at today's publication and think "man was that rough"  It has happened with everything from A to Z as the steady stream of progress moves us along. Internet publication will be no different.